Say it ain’t so! The design world is reeling from Madeline Weinrib’s announcement this week that she is shutting up shop and closing production on her company, one that so many New Yorkers and others across the country have come to count on for bold hand-printed textiles, rugs, and vintage pieces that bring color and character to any interior. In my own apartment, I have curtains made from her Indian woodblock print in my kitchen, vivid purple silk ikat in my living room, along with vintage velvet cushions and a wonderful long ‘50s Moroccan rug I bought after seeing her post a picture announcing a new shipment on Instagram. My relationship with her products has been long, deep, and evolving—I have my eye on much of her inventory.
I’d better speed up. “It’s kind of even shocking for me,” Weinrib says, describing the way that decisions mulled over the past couple of years have now become reality. Her San Francisco showroom currently has everything on sale, and New York will be cleared out by the end of May. (Look out for sale announcements.)
This is a new beginning for Weinrib, who in many ways became a little trapped by her own success after 20 years in the industry. An artist before she moved into textile design, “I have a very small business that became large,” is how she puts it. Demand for her products grew wildly, but her insistence on hand-made pieces crafted by far-flung artisans didn’t change.
She worked with fabric-producers in Uzbekistan and Jaipur, India, training them to leave imperfections in their work like drips and brushstrokes to give it poetry, as well as maintaining the richness and quality of the materials. This is the hard part for her—and also the reason she decided not to sell her company or her designs. “It was so exciting to work in rural communities and see people’s lifestyles improve with the success of the products. They could pay for education for their children, have clean water. Once the designs get knocked off, however, it’s very hard to sustain the business.”
It’s a challenge to remember that Weinrib’s bold stripes, zig-zags, and mandela prints, now ubiquitous in rug and fabric stores, once presented a learning curve for her customers. “When things are new they’re not always popular,” Weinrib remembers. “They take time to take off. I really saw that in my work.”
And now, she’s leaving us. She will continue to paint, and will keep a New York studio to do…who knows what? “I think a lot of creative things will happen but I don’t know what they will be yet,” she says, happily enigmatic. She is open to making carpets for clients on an individual, bespoke basis, and will also launch a line of rugs whose designs she worked on for two years with the late poet René Ricard, and will now put into production.
Weinrib is also forming a partnership with Vanessa Branson (sister of Richard) at the El Fenn hotel in the medina of her beloved Marrakesh, Morocco, a place she has stayed in and fell in love with during her regular trips to buy rugs. “Vanessa has this color palate for the hotel that is so sexy and vital,” she enthuses. Here Weinrib will focus her energies on contributing to the interiors, and to creating designs produced with local artisans for the hotel shop, as well as creating an inventory of her travel finds. “To me this feels very small and intimate and sustainable,” she says. “And I like the idea—that has been lost with the internet—of shopping as an adventure.”
But will she sell the pieces online? “Right now we’re debating,” she says, an idea she is leaning against.
Can I just say: PRETTY PLEASE?
The boutique at El Fenn in MarrakechPhoto: Kasia Gatkowska / Courtesy of El Fenn Marrakech
Madeline WeinribPhotographed by Michael Lisnet, Vogue, November 2004
Photo: Courtesy of Madeline Weinrib
Photo courtesy of Madeline Weinrib